awesome-tuis

Interesting that Jane Street has taken an interest in TUIs, I think mostly this renaissance is partly due to the current bloat of Electron GUIs. There are other great examples of TUIs that i've seen around the web: https://github.com/ratatui/awesome-ratatui https://terminaltrove.com/explore/ https://github.com/rothgar/awesome-tuis But I think we will swing back to using GUIs when we find a performant way of making them, I don't know what it is yet but surely someone is working on this. TUIs look good to look at though!

There are a lot of TUIs in existence worth looking at if one is interested or curious about them [0], [1], [2] [0] https://github.com/rothgar/awesome-tuis [1] https://terminaltrove.com/explore/ [2] https://github.com/ibraheemdev/modern-unix Even before Claude Code, I always see htop as the prime example of a good TUI.

This looks related to Awesome CLIs/TUIs and terminal trove which has lots both CLI and TUI apps. Awesome TUIs: https://github.com/rothgar/awesome-tuis Awesome CLIs: https://github.com/agarrharr/awesome-cli-apps Terminal Trove: https://terminaltrove.com/ I guess this is another one shows that the CLI and Unix is coming back in 2026.

Some of my personal favourites TUI are all over GitHub and there are lots of them to have a look at can be found here: https://github.com/rothgar/awesome-tuis https://terminaltrove.com/explore/ Building for Charm, ratatui and many others is really getting much easier than before thanks to AI.

I've seen lots of TUIs lately, why is that? What is the renewed interest? The only places I know of is Awesome TUIs [0] and terminaltrove [1] I can also see that Ratatui has an awesome list too [2]. [0] https://github.com/rothgar/awesome-tuis [1] https://terminaltrove.com/ [2] https://github.com/ratatui-org/awesome-ratatui

I miss UIs that were native to screens and efficiently and effectively deigned to work well on screens. What was wrong with windows and panels that actually filled square viewports, visually distinct separation between different things, use of colour to distinguish controls that are defaults, less common, disabled, etc., compact and easy to scan tables and lists, screens that display and update instantly… It is embarrassing that GUIs have become so bad that well designed TUIs running inside software designed to emulate computers from the 1970s now regularly[0] make better "desktop" applications than modern apps and anything adhering to the braindead design fad of the day. [0] https://github.com/rothgar/awesome-tuis

There's a mini-renaissance going on with new terminal tools, like tmux, neovim (which has an ecosystem of plugins itself), htop, and many more (https://github.com/rothgar/awesome-tuis). They take greater advantage of 24-bit color, "nerd" fonts (that have icons for glyphs), some graphics capability, and so on. I used Terminal for many years, too, but switched to iTerm2 a little over a year ago as I wanted to learn neovim.

I maintain a list of all my favorites here (the ones with rainbows have TUIs or pretty colors): https://docs.sweeting.me/s/system-monitoring-tools There's also this list: https://github.com/rothgar/awesome-tuis In particular ones I haven't seen mentioned already are: pudb (gdb for python), glances (better htop), memray, fdisk, ctop (htop for docker), dissy (dissasembler), fzf (file browser), micro (like nano meets Sublime Text), hexyl (hex viewer)

I'm a maintainer of Ratatui (a rust TUI crate). Here's a few links https://ratatui.rs/showcase/apps/ https://github.com/ratatui-org/awesome-ratatui https://discord.com/channels/1070692720437383208/10729061831... (made with ratatui channel on our discord server) We encourage our users to use https://github.com/charmbracelet/vhs to build out demos that look neat. My particular favorite of the bunch (from a look and feel perspective) is https://github.com/zaghaghi/openapi-tui Also, not ratatui, but worth a look: https://github.com/rothgar/awesome-tuis

I personally love TUI software, you don't have to worry about GUI toolkits, mouse focused interaction, you can run them remotely over SSH, they're often composable, and composability is much easier, and who doesn't like the hackerman aesthetic? Some things I don't like about modern TUIs is developers getting away from the purpose of them, portability. Often you'll find really beautiful TUIs that require installation of custom fonts for icons and other overcomplicated stuff like that. They can be nice, but generally they sacrifice the practical benefit to a significant degree. One I discovered yesterday, not really a TUI, more of a shell but still, extremely powerful, is kalc https://github.com/bgkillas/kalc which is a complete scientific and graphing calculator in the terminal. It depends on gnuplot for graphing, which is unfortunate sinc

Looks pretty neat. Would you mind PRing it to my awesome-tuis list? github.com/rothgar/awesome-tuis

Anyone else also looking around for more tools like MapSCII, this site frequently updates with other TUI and CLI tools with handy and quick install instructions. https://terminaltrove.com/ I can also see they have mapscii too which is great. https://terminaltrove.com/mapscii/ There's also awesome-tuis as well which I also find very useful as well. https://github.com/rothgar/awesome-tuis